Vikings, Corona, and Consciousness

Hello fellow mind travelers….. here are some recent must reads!

The Three Viking Philosophies That Made Them So Frightening by Abel Chan

The Vikings were, to say the least, a frightening group of people. From using magic mushrooms to invoke a berserker state in their skirmishes, to settling disputes through personal duels, to infanticide where those born with deformities or disabilities were left in the unforgiving conditions of the wild to die, the viking life was one that was harsh and full of bloodshed.

Perhaps the epitome of how their frightfulness was manifested would be their infamous execution ritual — the Blood Eagle.

The Blood Eagle had multiple stages to it, starting with the victim being tied face down. The shape of an eagle with outstretched wings would be carved into the victim’s back, before the victim’s ribs were hacked from the spine one by one using an ax.

All done while keeping the victim alive, the skin would then be pulled back to make the victim’s back look like wings and salt was rubbed into these horrendous wounds. To end it off, the executioner would pull the victim’s lungs out through the back, spreading them over the wings made from flesh and bone. The crowd could thus witness the lungs exhale their last breaths, making it look like the wings were fluttering for the final time…continue reading

What is Consciousness? By Brenden Weber

Let’s consider the question, what is consciousness?

I’m fascinated by this question because it’s mostly still a mystery. As in we don’t really know what consciousness is, why it happens, or why it exists!

This might be the most difficult and complex question facing philosophy. To examine this question, I’ll provide a language distinction for two important variables — the mind and the brain. The brain refers to our three-pound walnut-shaped organ placed on top of our spinal cord, the organs that routinely fires off one hundred billion neurons.

Now, the juicy part for today, the mind, the mind that is the mental state produced by the brain such as visual sensations, emotions, memories, thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs. It’s the you experiencing this right now that has created mental state experiencing this right now…continue reading

The Three Agnostic Articles of Faith by Abel Chan

Philosophies from the Church of the Apathetic Agnostic

It was back in 2008 when I received the invitation.

“My church’s having a camp during the winter. Join us, it’ll be fun.”

I was fourteen. And the blessed lack of intelligence that came with my adolescence meant that I was ignorantly happy — free from all burdens that follow behind the recognition of reality.

In other words, fun was not a commodity that was hard to come by. Besides, subjecting myself to an organization that frowned upon cigarettes, sex, and all things fun didn’t sound like an ideal way to spend the winter holidays.

So I did what any responsible teenager would. I pushed the responsibility away, tactfully putting the Islamic background of a friend to selfish use.

“I’ll go if Ismail does.”

This way, the odds were in my favor, right? And I even managed to avoid outright rejecting the invitation. Go, me.

As such, in the face of miscalculated probability, I ended up spending my winter break in church camp. Turns out my Muslim friend had a rather liberal outlook with regards to his religious beliefs. Huh, who’d have thought?…continue reading

On COVID-19 and Pandemics: A Stoic Perspective by Massimo Pigliucci

I’m sure it is not news to you that the world is experiencing a rapidly expanding infection by the COVID-19 virus, a type of Coronavirus that has first manifested itself in the Chinese province of Wuhan, and that — at the moment of this writing — is causing a large number of cases in various other parts of the world, particularly Japan, South Korea, Iran, and Italy.

It’s also very likely that you have been exposed to a barrage of nonsensical or pseudoscientific notions about the virus, that you have been told by obviously incompetent government officials that there is no reason to panic (mostly so that the stock market wouldn’t drop precipitously), and that you are worried about what might happen to you and your loved ones in the near future.

For all these reasons, here is a Stoic guide to the COVID-19 epidemic, and — more generally — to any future pandemic. Keep it handy.

The way I’m going to tackle the issue is by using the threefold Stoic curriculum as it was taught in ancient schools: that is, we are going to look at the epidemic from the point of view of “physics,” logic, and ethics. The word physics, for the Stoics, actually refers to a broad approach to the understanding of the world, which includes what we nowadays call the natural sciences and metaphysics. Logic is also understood in a broader-than-usual sense, to mean anything to do with proper reasoning. Finally, ethics too has an enlarged meaning in Stoicism, as it encompasses not just the study of right and wrong, but our best understanding of how to live a human life that is actually worth living…continue reading

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Stay safe out there!